a peculiar authenticity to their pleasure, as of
some assurance blown in the bottle from which their joy-draught was
poured. Nowhere else but in Rome could they have imagined such a group
of bronze men and maidens and web-footed horses struggling so bravely,
so aimlessly (except to show their figures), in a shallow bowl from
which the water spilled so unstintedly over white marble brims beginning
to paint themselves palely green.

At the end of their glad day this fountain came last of the things that
made Bronx Park such a paradise for eight hours; though it might have
been their first delight if they had taken one way about instead of
another in their tour of the large, easy pleasance. But suddenly at
half-past eleven they found themselves ravenously hungry, and demanded
to be driven to the best restaurant by the shortest way that the mild
youth whom they fell to at once inside the park gate could find.

He had the very horse he ought to have had--old, weary, infirm, decently
hiding its disabilities under a blanket, and, when this was stripped
away, confessing them in a start so reluctant that they had to be
explained as the stiffness natural to any young, strong, and fresh horse
from resting too long. It did, in fact, become more animated as time
went on, and perhaps it began to take an interest in the landscape left
so charmingly wild wherever it could be. It apparently liked being alive
there with its fares, kindred spirits, who could appreciate the privacy
of a bland Monday after the popular outing of the day before. Almost
nobody else was in the park. For a time they noted only a young fellow
with a shut book in his hand taking his way up a woody slope and fading
into a green shadow; but presently they came to a grassy point running
down to the road, where, under a tree, there was a young mother sitting
with an open book in her lap, and, a little way from her outstretched
little foot, her baby asleep in the smallest of go-carts--the
collapsible sort that you can fold and carry in the cars and then unfold
for use when you come to the right place. The baby had a white
sunbonnet, and a thick fringe of her straw-colored hair came out over
her forehead under it, and when the companions smiled together at the
baby, and the horse intelligently faltered, the young mother fluttered
the idle leaves of her book with her hand and smiled back at them, and
took the credit of the little one, not unkindly, yet proudly. They
sa